


it might sound absurd, but don't be naive, even heroes have the right to bleed

by callmefairyofthesea



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series), Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: Behind the Scenes, Drabble Collection, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, One Shot Collection, Rated T for swearing, Slice of Life, because everyone loves a gen fic, but this is more about character studies and friendships, if you tilt your head and squint you might see a couple of ships, this is just me filling in the blanks between episodes, updates when I need to take a break from writing other things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 16,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29071284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmefairyofthesea/pseuds/callmefairyofthesea
Summary: A collection of one-shots from throughout the series, in which team is allowed to process their trauma, their differences, and their strength. It's not so hard to keep going, not as long as they have each other.
Comments: 50
Kudos: 35





	1. Ghost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: How Long is Forever
> 
> POV: Raven
> 
> Anyone else super curious about what the heck happened to Raven in that future timeline where Starfire disappeared? Like. Trigon must have been defeated. But hot damn, did I want to write a story to explore it.

**Ghost**

“Hey,” he whispers from behind her, voice soft and gentle. It is the tone he uses for strays, and it _gnaws_ at her.

“You can’t change my mind.”

“Raven, look at me.”

She dully hugs the white cloak tighter around her wasting frame, hating the tentativeness in his voice, the shaking in his hands as he reaches out and then curls them into fists. Too scared to touch her, and how can she blame him?

She doesn’t turn, so he brushes her shoulder, bleeding anxiety like a fresh battle wound. Her mind is still scraped raw from the apocalypse, her nails twisted with talons, her second pair of eyes split like fissures through her forehead. Trigon is dead, and she killed him. Trigon is dead, and his red skin cracked like chalk dust. His horns tumbled from the blood-red sky, and she felt _good,_ and she felt _vindictive,_ and she felt _free_ until she turned around and saw his expression.

Until she saw _her_ in the corner of the smoking ruins, pale like dust and ashes.

Green eyes.

Disappointment.

How long has it been?

“I miss her too,” he says softly in her ear, and his familiar arms wrap around her, holding her tight like the worse has not happened, like she is not a demon and a monster, like _she_ is still here. Her hood is pulled down; his calloused fingers run through her hair. “But you can’t give up. Not now. Not after…”

His voice cracks.

Of course he can’t say it.

She looks up at his sharp, angled face. The fresh lines of re-opened cuts, the rust brown of dried blood, the purple of bruises. But they’re different than what she remembers. The blistered, shiny burn on his cheek is puckered with time. Healed over.

How long has it been?

“I’m not giving up.”

“Please don’t leave,” he begs, voice cracking for the first time in years.

How long has it been? He is too old to be eighteen. Deep bags hang beneath his eyes, new lines cross his forehead, and his smile is shadowed with fatigue. The hair at his temples is silvering, and she thinks that’s the worst part—that Garfield Logan has been forced to grow up. He is supposed to be young forever. The golden glitter of childhood, the sparkling laughter of someone who chooses to live in the fountain of youth. But the person in front of her is old. Broken.

“I’m getting help.”

How long has it been since stone statues crumbled into tombstones of innocents that will never come back, swept away in the fire of demons and her own black magic? Time lost meaning when she froze it; she is stuck at eighteen forever.

“I _need_ you. Dick left, and Vic is—”

Choking sobs.

She looks into his eyes wearily, trying to focus on green when her vision is shrouded with red. “I can’t. You know I can’t. She keeps going away. Just like the others. Again and again and…” She trails off, staring into the distance space of white walls and white lights, hoping to see her ghost again. Bright eyes and flaming hair.

Hoping that she won’t look disappointed this time.

“Raven,” he begs, tears welling in his eyes. “Rae. C’mon, Rae. Don’t do this.”

She sees golden skin and plated armor. The faint press of purple and red at the edge of all the white, disappearing into the room that the monks of Azarath prepared for her. Runes and emptiness and a place where she can fall apart without cracking this dimension into its second apocalypse. She desperately wants to follow. “ _Starfire_.”

She pulls away from the arms around her, forgetting who they belong to, stretching a hand toward the memory of _warmth,_ and he tries to hold her back. He clings, and she shoves him away with magic because she’s _right there._

Raven shuts the door and finds herself alone.

She wonders why they left.

Sometimes, the emptiness is interrupted by ghosts. Sometimes, time tilts sideways into seconds of coherence, and he’s back. _She’s_ back. But they never stay, never sit with her longer than a few heartbeats, and when the white overpowers the red, and loneliness numbs the pain, she can’t remember their names. She has no way to tell time except for the bookends that are his arms around her.

“Remember me?” he asks, and she tries to slide her fingers over his scalp, wondering when his hair disappeared, wondering why only some of the hallucinations are tangible, but he holds her hand like it’s a lifeline and refuses to let go. Before, after—in the liminal space that is frozen forever—she runs a trembling finger down his forearm and feels the bones and asks if he is real. He gives a hiccupped laugh, wearing nothing but black and the smell of liquor, and takes another swig from the amber bottle on his hip. On the floor, a crumpled obituary confirms the death of people she does not know.

 _Hospital bills,_ he says, as though that makes sense, as if she remembers who Vic is.

 _At the circus,_ he says to a question she never asked.

His ghost fades too fast for a place where time is not real. Skin and bones and starvation, like the solidness of his body has deteriorated into the gray edges of her mind, into dreams and ethereal nothingness. She killed Trigon, she suddenly remembers, and she liked the way his blood rained on the streets like acid and hellfire, and she liked losing control for the first time in eighteen years.

 _She_ is disappointed again, floating from the ceiling and refusing to smile.

“I miss you,” she tells the emptiness, and green skin hugs her tight. His ghost is fainter, even though his body has thickened with alcohol and smells like dirt and rain. He says nothing this time.

He says nothing the next time.

And when he stops visiting, sometime during the stretch in which she is eighteen forever, she wonders why his ghost lasted so much longer than the others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate readers and reviewers! Y'all brighten my day so much. Feel free to stop in and say hi :D !!


	2. Reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Calling All Titans
> 
> POV: Cyborg
> 
> Couldn’t stop thinking about the Brotherhood of Evil arc. And how many months the team was long-distance and how relieved and awkward and excited that Cyborg and Beast Boy would be to see each other again.

“Cyborg!”

He doesn’t have time to recognize the voice—a childish, cracking, cheerful whoop—before wiry arms rope around his neck, and weight settles against his shoulders. It feels good. Familiar. It’s been too long since he’s heard that high, piping voice, and it’s so deeply ingrained in him that he’s smiling before he realizes who it is. Because that voice is _home_.

He’s already relaxing into it, muscle memory making his body go limp, because it’s been too fucking long since he felt safe. Thirteen months in the battlefield, and Vic is tired of sleeping with one eye open, knowing the second his guard drops is the second someone gets the drop on him is the second he’s dead. He has spent too long not knowing if the team is okay, not knowing why Dick’s GPS tracker died six weeks ago, not knowing if any of them were left.

It doesn’t matter now.

“BB,” he growls, voice too thick and choked up to pretend. “C’mon, man, lemme see you.”

Gar laughs his high-pitched laughter and readjusts his grip around Vic’s neck. God, that brings back memories. That tiny-ass kid in his dumb Doom Patrol mask, wrapped around Vic’s neck, screaming, “Who _cares_ if you’re half-robot?” Pulling at his sweatshirt and trying to rip it off like it’s that easy.

“Uh-uh!”

“Get your clingy-ass off me,” he says, and this feels like every other time Gar has hung from his shoulders and tried to shove tofu down his throat. Every time he has spring-boarded off his back into battle. Every time he has scampered up and hugged tight and called Vic _Chrome-Dome._ But Vic is nineteen, and they have been fighting the Brotherhood so long that he hasn’t felt green arms around his neck in a lifetime.

“Never!” Gar shouts, and Vic knows that he isn’t moving anytime soon. The kid is sitting on his shoulders like it’s the only safe place left.

He takes a deep breath, feeling Gar sway on his shoulders like a cape, and throws his arms back. Gar screeches as he is pulled over Vic’s head by the ruff of his neck, but Vic has _missed_ him, and for the first time in months, he wants to _see_ him.

Gar rolls into the street like a rag doll, and Vic’s breath freezes in his chest.

He almost looks like the same person. Almost. Same green skin and big dark eyes and crooked fang poking through his lopsided smile. But his hair hangs too long and shaggy. His shoulders are bowed in like he’s not used to being tall, and Vic doesn’t know when the hell that happened. All he knows is that Gar’s face is too dirty and bruised to have come from anywhere but the battlefield. That his uniform is ragged, and his boots are water stained, and his eyes are nervous, like he’s afraid of what Vic might think.

“God,” Vic says, because suddenly he has the stilted, terrified thought that maybe this war broke them. They’ve both spent too long sleeping in hostels with knives beneath their pillows, waiting for Dick to contact them. Staring at their broken communicators and thinking they’re the only ones left. Radio silence for _weeks._

Gar is staring at him with dead eyes.

Vic is scared that the kid won’t like what he sees.

He knows he has new dents that dimple his armor, purple rings beneath his eye, scraped up metal plates, missing bolts, a new scar that races jagged down his cheekbone, and what if—

“I missed you, Cy,” Gar says, even though his voice is a little too self-conscious and little too deep.

Vic feels his mouth pucker and pull into an involuntary grin.

He falls to his knees, sending a resounding _thunk_ through the shattered streets of Paris, in the middle of the chaos and the sirens, and pulls the kid tight to his chest.

He doesn’t care that the moment is a little too awkward because they’re rusty at being best friends and not sure how to act like family again. He doesn’t care that Gar’s refusing to make eye contact, that he’s a little too tense and walled-up even though the war is finally over. At least he smells familiar—something rustic like camping trips and lake-fishing. Vic doesn’t care that this moment is too quiet, that he has built up so many stories and words that he doesn’t know where to start.

All he cares about is Gar, climbing back onto his shoulders and hanging on.

All he cares about is finding the rest of their ragtag family.

And never fucking let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate readers and reviewers! Y'all brighten my day so much. Feel free to stop in and say hi :D !!


	3. Packages

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Spellbound
> 
> POV: Raven
> 
> I really felt like exploring Raven’s mindset after the whole Malchior debacle. You know, because she doesn’t usually let people see her vulnerable or let her emotions get too attached. So I wrote something to let her process that mess.

Raven stares blankly at the ceiling again, eyes lingering on the swathe of shadows that blanket her room. She can almost forget sunlight with her curtains drawn and her door locked. She can almost forget his paper rose and unraveling hands, can almost forget the smell of incense and oiled petals on the floor. She has been trying to forget. In pale, silvered monasteries on the flip side of this dimension, she was taught to bundle her pain into packages with neat little bows. They tried to package her. A tiny, apocalyptic child that they tied up with ribbon and wrapping paper and meditation, as if that could circumvent fate.

She misses the simplicity, sometimes.

On Earth, in Jump City, pain is like ocean tides and flooding. Everywhere, soaked into the seams of common sense like dry rot. And Malchior, bound in dark magic and leatherbound pages, made her feel like maybe— _maybe_ it wasn’t so selfish to live in the present. For one, glittering week, she had allowed herself to forget.

She wants to forget _him_.

Smooth words and eyes like fissured ice.

She tries to package it up, tries to smooth the wrinkled paper back over boxes with tape, and wrap the memories into darkness. She wants to bury them in the closet and never see daylight, and maybe the dust of disuse will dull the ache. For too long, she has pretended to forget the things she is not allowed to do or feel, and this pain doesn’t seem like punishment enough.

He nearly killed her family.

For all her faults and inabilities, Raven thinks they should be mad at her. For using dark magic. For losing control. For risking a child’s life when she is supposed to be a hero _._ But her family is never angry the way she wants them to be or scared the way the monks were. Cyborg knocks on her door too often, carrying mugs of tea, and sits with her in silence until she drains it. At dawn, she finds Robin on the roof, straight-backed and cross-legged, wondering if she will teach him how to meditate. And Beast Boy, as if knowing they are balanced on high wire, leaves her alone. The morning after everything, she finds a potted cactus in the hallway. Prickly. Enduring. Green. He doesn’t sign his name, but he doesn’t have to.

She sees him gardening beneath her window, back bent over the rocks, and tries to remember if she ever thanked him.

“I am sorry,” Starfire says at some point, curled up in Raven’s bed with her head thrown over the edge. Red hair tumbles through stripes of sunlight, and Raven wonders when the curtains parted. She wonders how long they’ve been in this room, drifting between dreams and memories and quiet words at midnight. Three days ago, they called it a sleepover, as if they knew anything about Earth, and sat in pajamas and slippers.

It’s not a sleepover after half a week, but Starfire, like her, is used to communal sleeping. It’s easier with the sound of someone else breathing.

“Sorry for what?”

“It is my fault that you were lonely. I allowed rekmas.”

It takes a second for Raven to place the word, and when she remembers Blorthog Day and drifting, she frowns. “Starfire.”

“We had not meditated together in weeks, and we had not gone to the mall of shopping, and if I had been there for you—”

“—don’t.”

“But I should have—”

“—you did everything right. I was the one who…”

Starfire is so much touchier than the monks, and her arm goes around Raven like sunlight. Her emotions leak through their connected skin, guilt and something harder. “I wish to be someone you can confide in.”

“I’m the one who should be apologizing. I should have told you about Malchior, but I was…”

“Scared?”

“Ashamed.” She is still new at voicing emotions, because Starfire insists, but the monks only taught her how to package.

“I would not judge you.”

“I know,” says Raven, and she sinks into Starfire’s skin and emotions, and loses herself in the maelstrom. On Earth, pain is like ocean tides and flooding. Everywhere, soaked into the seams of common sense like dry rot. But Starfire is sunlight and scissors, and Raven’s neatly tied packages hidden in darkness are starting to come undone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate readers and reviewers! Y'all brighten my day so much. Feel free to stop in and say hi :D !!


	4. Wanderlust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Lightspeed
> 
> POV: Jinx
> 
> Sometimes I like to think about what Jinx got up to after she left the HIVE in season 5. Also I’m maybe obsessed with her aesthetic.

So the whole ex-villain thing isn’t perfect.

Not when Jinx has pink hair and an attitude, and the locals aren’t interested in letting her grocery shop (not when the news has pasted her picture and background check for any asshole to judge her for). And Jinx is a lot of things, but she’s not, you know, _vindictive._ If Jump City doesn’t want her around, that’s fine. That’s good.

She’s always wanted to go backpacking across Europe, anyway.

And sure, maybe Kid Flash is too wrapped up in the whole hero thing across the Atlantic Ocean. And sure, maybe Jinx isn’t used to going solo. And sure, maybe she really fucking misses her old team when she actually lets herself think about them.

But this is good, you know? Gives her time to think about what she really wants out of life. Philosophical bullshit or whatever.

Or that’s what she tells herself each time she leans up against another rotten tree stump and pulls leaves out of her hair, pink magic sparking everywhere and tearing the seams of her winter thermals.

Because oh _right,_ she’s never been lucky.

And yeah, it’s probably been five or six months since she’s seen an actual city or used something that wasn’t an outhouse. She hasn’t talked to people since some small-ass village in Germany, hasn’t replaced her thick wool mittens or worn-down boots, hasn’t bought a new toothbrush even though the bristles are starting to fall out. And yeah, her voice goes scratchy after she goes a few weeks forgetting to talk. And yeah, she kind of misses people.

But for the first time in probably _ever,_ Jinx thinks she might be some kind of happy. Not in a saccharine, sunshine yellow kind of way where everyone is kind and laughing, and she’s suddenly got a higher respect for the sanctity of life or whatever the hell.

But happy in that way that means she’s not being puppeteered by someone higher up the ladder. She’s not pulling all-nighters to save face because Gizmo just got snotted out of Cyborg’s nose and ruined their team’s reputation. She’s not biting through her lip every time Madame Rouge looks down her nose and tears Jinx into tiny, tiny pieces. She’s not pulling her hair out because she thinks she’s so much more than the HIVE, but she’s not the Brotherhood, and she’s not a hero, and she’s not a villain.

Not anymore.

(Even if she sometimes forgets to pay when she picks up new supplies. Old habits die hard.)

So, this whole middle-of-nowhere, Thoreau-Walden _nonsense_ is a nice change of pace. Not an ending or anything, but a sweet pause in the absolute trash fire that is Jinx’s fucked up life.

She likes it here.

The only voice in her head is hers, and that’s some kind of luxury she didn’t know she could afford. Some luxury that’s almost as good as the wanderlust.

Star-frosted skies. Mountains. Free rides on top of country trains. Roasted duck for dinner, if the stupid things get too close and set her magic off. It’s not a perfect life, but it’s a good one. Just wilderness and heading away from that place and away from those people.

It’s enough.

You know, most of the time.

There are some nights when she gets a little sentimental. When she runs into some campgrounds and sees college kids and their camper and their beers. When there’s a redhead who reminds her of Mammoth, or when some kid takes down too many bottles of wine and overtalks like Kid Wykkyd used to. All night they’ll laugh and laugh, and Jinx will huddle in her sleeping bag listening. Remembering.

But it’s not enough that she ever wants to go _back._ There’s only so many times she can excuse the puffed-up sexist _bullshittery_ they put her through. She loves them (loved them?), but you know. Too many boundaries they crossed with each other. All those rules that they broke because society sucked, and money was hard to come by. (That doesn’t mean they had to be sucky to each other.)

 _A good luck amulet,_ Gizmo had snorted when she told him. Flicking through the museum brochure. _Yeah, right._

Because it was too fucking hard for him to pretend to care.

So yeah, she doesn’t want to go back. Not when she knows she’s bad luck and a bad personality rolled up in one (1) pint-sized, pissed-off body. It would have been nice to neutralize her powers, though. With the amulet. Would have given her some belated satisfaction that she’s not _all_ bad, not like everyone’s always told her.

Not like that fucking psychiatrist who should have known better, who should have known that kids don’t grow up good and straight when no one believes they can.

Jinx isn’t a hero, but at least now she’s pretty sure she’s not a villain either.

So when Kid Flash shows up in the middle of the Swiss Alps, vibrating so fast that heat radiates off his sweat-glitter skin, Jinx isn’t really in the mood to talk.

“No,” she says. Automatic, really, because he doesn’t get to come here after half a year of _nothing._

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“I’m backpacking, not stupid.” She pulls a newspaper out of her bag, flashes the front page even though it’s in German, even though it’s a couple weeks old. “Brotherhood is winning.”

“Yup,” he says, no blustering because he’s the kind of straightforward that Jinx doesn’t get a lot of in her field. “That means we need you.”

She snorts. Sends a scattering of pink magic toward his feet and smiles when his laces knot together. “I’m done. I quit. I’m not actively destroying Jump City anymore. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Is it enough for you?”

And screw him for his big blue eyes and his assumptions. “I like it out here.”

“Okay.” He shrugs half-heartedly. All smooth, casual, like he’s okay if she says no. “Didn’t hurt to ask.”

Which is, you know, _new._

And it’s _new_ when he sits down, chest heaving, to rest for a hot second. Because, apparently, running across the United States and then the Atlantic Ocean and then half of Europe is not exactly a picnic. It’s new when he offers to split one of his dozen roast beef sandwiches. It’s new that she doesn’t…actually…mind it.

Jinx likes it out here. She likes that she always ends up walking through rain puddles, and she likes that Germany’s Black Forest nearly scraped her knees raw on tripped-over roots. This backpacking thing isn’t supposed to be forever, or whatever, but six months later and she still doesn’t know who she wants to be.

Just that heroics is a bigger commitment than she wants right now.

It’s one thing to say goodbye to her ragtag family. It’s another thing to go back and fight them. Side-by-side with the goody-two-shoes Titans with their bottomless bank account and League connections.

God, no wonder she sucked up to Madame Rouge. Would have been nice to have a bigger, badder network to fall back on when finances got tight.

But no.

No, that’s not who Jinx wants to be anymore.

“If I help you,” she says all of a sudden. Kicking aside a patch of snow and stupidly hardy weeds.

Kid Flash glances over at her with this _bemused_ look on his face. Like her going out on a limb is funny or something. “If you help me.”

“I’m not doing it for free.”

He nods, taking it in stride, as if this doesn’t surprise him at all. “Only fair that I pay for your services. What currency you looking for?”

And Jinx has a half-baked idea that has something to do with Jump City and amnesty, but she doesn’t know what strings Kid Flash can pull. She doesn’t know if he has a League string or a Flash string or a Titans string.

But it doesn’t hurt to ask.

“Robin could probably swing it,” Kid Flash says, propping himself up on one elbow. Beneath him, the snow is melted, the grass scorched. “If that’s what you really want.”

She nods sharply. Not trusting herself to speak.

All she knows is that this is a way home, back to the one place that she thinks she halfway likes. Not Europe. Not the Alps or Cologne or Brussels or…wherever the hell she’s been.

Home.

And yeah, Jump City is full of ex-teammates. Ex-family. It’s got the sour taste of bad history and stupid mistakes and jail cells.

But it’s a long drive away from the backwards town she grew up in.

She picked Jump City out all by herself, too long ago when she hitchhiked out of hell and never looked back. The first place that wanderlust walked her to, and she likes the little nest she’s built for herself there. She thinks she can make it bigger, better.

She thinks that maybe the locals might learn to accept her if the Titans say they have to.

So she says, “Deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate readers and reviewers! Y'all brighten my day so much. Feel free to stop in and say hi :D !!


	5. Mothers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After The Prophecy
> 
> POV: Robin
> 
> Robin and Raven’s friendship gives me life. Especially in season 4, when she’s struggling with ending the world. So I started thinking about who Raven might have gone to after she lost Arella and Azarath.

“Do you remember your mother?”

Note: Robin knows Raven a little too well to think this is impulsive. Note: they’ve been working in silence for so long that her voice is raspy. Congested. Note: She might be crying.

Stiffly, he straightens his back. Swallows. Because he should have checked in a long time ago, three days ago when she confessed Trigon and the mark of Skath, but he’s been locked in a death scroll through old research documents and news clippings because how the _hell_ does someone survive a volcanic eruption. And why the hell does someone make deals with the devil. And how the hell does someone think it’s a _good idea_ to work toward the end of the world.

Note: he’s still scrolling instead of looking at Raven.

“Uh.” Clearing his throat, Robin swivels in his computer chair to face her. Moves an arm to his neck and stares at the wall. Except Raven deserves more than this, and he _knows_ that. But he hasn’t talked about family in so long their names burn his throat.

Suddenly her hood is down, and Raven’s eyes are large. Dilated. The single bulb of the research room sways over them. Note: she’s definitely crying.

And they are just two wordless idiots staring at each other in the middle of framed newspapers and police reports and filing cabinets. Self-consciously, Robin glances at the clock.

Note: it’s 3:05. In the morning.

Raven looks away first. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s—it’s okay. It’s just… I don’t. I don’t talk about her.”

Nodding, she folds her arms. She’s crying, but not loudly. Just streaks of silver. Red eyes. Her shoulders are still; her face is flat.

“Is your mother…?” Robin asks uncomfortably. He makes a general sort of hand gesture. Not sure how to ask _alive._

“No.” Her lips are pulled in, her teeth pressed together. Not making eye contact. “I don’t… I don’t know when.”

“Oh.”

He wishes he was better at this. Except he hasn’t talked about this to anyone since Gotham, not since too many days in depression in bed. Fine china platters and a quiet butler, silk sheets, closed windows. And there is a block in his throat that refuses to unstick even for Raven.

“I’m not good at talking about this kind of… Um. Have you tried—have you tried talking to…?” Deflecting. Trying to push this on someone else. Even though it’s not fair, even though he knows what’s in their background files, even though he knows some of them have had it worse.

“Starfire didn’t—Starfire had Galfore.”

“Right.” He knew that. He knows that.

“Cyborg was…” Raven shakes her head, like the memory still stings. “He didn’t want to talk about it. And—and Beast Boy has been avoiding me since I asked.”

Note: he’s her last resort. Note: it’s too late to stop.

“Oh.”

Raven tightens her fingers together, her knuckles whitening over the paperwork that she’s been flipping through for the last three hours. “I thought that you would be okay if I asked. Since I already know…”

Right. Right, since she saw their shadows fall inside his mind, too long ago when he was hallucinating Slade, when she linked their thoughts together and watched it happen slow-motion, when he was bruised on his own damn fists and trauma.

Robin sniffs, folding a case file shut, biting hard on his lip to keep his eyes from welling over. “You’ve never talked about her before. I didn’t know you were close.”

“We weren’t.”

“Oh.” Bite harder.

“She wasn’t okay. Around me. I reminded her of…”

He remembers this in her background file, and his stomach twists over. “Right.”

Raven gives a bitter laugh, but it splinters in the quiet. Forced. One thin line away from sobs. “I thought it would be different, if I went back to Azarath. I thought, maybe she wouldn’t blame me for it, but…”

They are communicating a lot for how many words they can’t say. How many sentences they refuse to finish. And Robin didn’t know she _could_ go to Azarath, didn’t know she had, didn’t know that her mother was alive when she left for Earth.

Robin is still biting his lip.

Raven sighs. “It was too late. Trigon had already been there.”

“I’m sorry.” He looks at his green gloves. Imagines standing up and putting a hand on her shoulder, the way Starfire always does for him. Imagines comforting Raven the way his words aren’t.

“Yeah. I should…” She nods at the door, the clock. “I should go to bed.”

Note: the lights are flickering. Note: her magic is leaking.

“You don’t have to leave,” he says.

“I haven’t been getting enough sleep. And it’s three in the morning.”

Robin is used to that, though. Used to sipping on coffee mugs until exhaustion tips him over. Raven’s the only one who sometimes sits with him at the ass crack of dawn, going over the Jump City police reports, the insurance paperwork.

She deserves _something_ from him. Something better than “sorry.”

“She was an acrobat,” he ends up saying. “That’s why—that’s why you saw her fall. Someone cut the ropes.”

Silence. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood.

“How old were you?” Raven eventually asks, and he feels her hand on his shoulder. The way he couldn’t do it for her.

“Nine.”

There’s the sound of breath being sucked in too fast. The smell of lavender as Raven’s magic pulls between them.

Note: they stop talking. Note: he prefers it.

Raven just stands behind him, holding on, and Robin reaches back to cover her hand. Trying to say _thank you_ even though his mouth won’t.

Because he’s the leader of this team, and they’re all messed up, but he needs to hold it together for at least one of them. And right now that’s Raven, breaking down in silence, clinging to the one person who didn’t run away when she asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate readers and reviewers so much! It really brightens my day to see people are enjoying my story :D Feel free to stop in and say hi!


	6. Zookeeper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Every Dog Has His Day
> 
> POV: Beast Boy
> 
> Started thinking about who the cuddliest Titans are. Then I started thinking about being touch-deprived during COVID. This was the result.
> 
> Also, because I just realized that I never mentioned this, I headcanon that the team doesn't share their real names with each other until season 5 when they find out Beast Boy's name, and Robin doesn't share until the Ding Dong Daddy episode (betcha anything the briefcase had something about Dick Grayson or Bruce Wayne in it). Point being, if I'm writing before season 5, I use their superhero names. If I'm writing after season 5, I use their real names.

After Soto, it’s easier to tell everyone what he needs. That he can’t be alone, because the animals are fighting, and the ADHD makes it worse, and if he’s alone, he’ll be stuck in option paralysis for eight hours before he finds the shortcut in his brain that lets him get up and eat.

After Soto, the team seems to know what he needs, more often than they used to. When he’s pacing the common room again, stringing thread around his fingers because it’s _something_ to focus on, something that’s not the literal screaming of his brain thinking about _everything_ and nothing and feeling like maybe it’s migration season but maybe actually hibernation, Cyborg will just tousle his hair. Throw a video game controller at him and pat the couch. He lets the TV do most of the work because the TV is a magic box of reward-stimulus-serotonin that makes Beast Boy’s animal brain light up.

After Soto, Robin will notice when he’s been sitting on the couch for five days straight, next to a wadded-up pile of protein bar wrappers and empty water bottles, his thumbs cramped up from trying to get past that _damn_ level on MegaMonkey Racers.

“How long you been working on this?” Robin will ask, and Beast Boy will count on his fingers for a second before sighing and admitting that he needs a new hyperfixation.

So Robin will drag him off to the training course, into the sunlight so that Beast Boy gets some vitamin D and exercise, and he’s not an animal, he’s not. But having the team act like his personal zookeepers, making sure he gets what he needs, making sure he’s _okay,_ making sure he’s got enough stimulation and enough sleep and enough social interaction, makes the whole life thing a lot easier. (Especially when it’s consensual).

After Soto, Raven asks if she can feel his emotions, to memorize what his aura feels like in case he goes missing again, and Beast Boy figures he’s okay with that. More than okay with that, even though Raven blinks when she’s done. Sits down with a frown line, massaging her temples like she’s nursing a headache.

“Oh,” she says.

Beast Boy knew his head was loud, but not _that_ loud. “You okay?”

Raven teaches him how to meditate, until it doesn’t work, and then she teaches him yoga instead.

It helps.

But Starfire’s the only one who figures out the one thing Beast Boy refuses to ask for.

They’re both physical people, and he knew that when they moved into the Tower. He knows he is loose with his hands and his personal bubble and that he needs to keep moving, and touching things, and just sort of making sure all the animals in his head are happy so they stop pressing up against the glass that is his self-control.

So when Starfire asks if she can pet him, a few days after Soto when Beast Boy is massaging his own damn neck from where the collar was, he finally realizes that this can be mutually beneficial.

“Oh my _god,_ yes,” he tells her, shapeshifting into a simple tabby cat and curling around her legs.

She laughs, because she’s Starfire, and she likes to let people know when she’s happy. As soon as she picks him up, Beast Boy goes all loose-limbed and relaxed, and that’s how Starfire is the first person since Rita to figure out that he purrs.

It becomes a regular thing, most Fridays if they’re free, if Jump City is quiet, Starfire floating up to the roof and waiting for him to join her. Most Fridays, Beast Boy squishes his body into something small and furry because she likes soft things, but sometimes he’s just human. The first time he doesn’t shapeshift, he worries it’ll be weird. That maybe Starfire will clam up and put boundaries on this weird grooming tradition (which is fair, she’s allowed to).

Except she doesn’t. She gets bright-eyed, like she’s been waiting for this.

“My sister and I often did this,” she tells him, running her fingers through his hair, working through the tangles. “It has been so long.”

“Blackfire did this with you?” Beast Boy sits on his fingers to keep from stimming on the loose thread sticking out of Starfire’s left boot.

“Mm. On Tamaran, we have Taxlath’i venn. They are a kind of grooming room?”

“What, like a hair salon?” Beast Boy’s chest thrums as Starfire dips her fingers over his shoulder blades and scratches.

“No, it is more communal.”

“Huh.” He goes quiet until he has to move, and then he stretches across the roof, kicking his legs out, rolling over. Starfire kneads his belly, and he remembers, all of a sudden, that her people are descended from something like cats.

“I have missed this,” says Starfire, and that’s all it takes for Beast Boy to stop caring about what is and isn’t normal.

“Can I?”

She says, “Yes.”

And Beast Boy gets to rub out the knots in her muscles and feel her silky hair, and it’s just nice to be touching someone. Feeling Star’s chest go in and out while he massages the same circle over her palm a hundred times, until his brain goes calm, and he realizes it’s sunset, and he realizes that they’re each other’s zookeepers.

Except maybe the better word is friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone have a particularly favorite Titan dynamic that I haven't done yet? I'm open, if the inspiration hits just right.
> 
> (Edited 2/11/2020 because I realized I called him Gar instead of Beast Boy a couple times)


	7. Human

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After The Sum of His Parts
> 
> POV: Starfire
> 
> Got a request for Cy/Star friendship, and I like to think that they have the most philosophical relationship on the team. That they can talk about things like this.

“If you are not dying, then you are…ill?” Starfire is not sure why she asks it, only that they are alone in the garage, tinkering with metal bits and bobs the way they always do. Not making anything in particular, just enjoying the rhythm of their hands in silence.

Since yesterday, since the tunnel in the junkyard and the cold gray light that spread over Cyborg’s body, Starfire has been trying not to remember pre-Titans. Cyborg has not said so, not explicitly, but the blanks are easy to fill in when Starfire is familiar with sick bodies. Familiar with green light and scalpels.

Except when she asks, Cyborg gets a thoughtful look on his face and sets aside a half-finished robotic car, the wires sticking out. “Not sure I’d call it that.”

“Then what would you call it?”

He laughs, lightly and then awkwardly. “Most people would call it disabled.”

“You would not?” The word does not translate exactly, not into her mother tongue, but there is so much about Earth that Starfire does not understand, so much she is too nervous to question. ‘Disabled’ is different from ‘ill,’ she thinks. But she has memories of overlap, memories of her brother strapped down with his veins glowing green.

Cyborg shrugs. When he opens a panel in his right forearm, a neat box of glowing circuitry, he waves Starfire forward. “Pretty cool, right?”

She nods.

“You have anything like this on Tamaran?”

“There are those who have prosthetics. Not like this, but I am familiar with the concept. You were once…?”

“All human.”

“You are still human.”

When he looks at her, his eye is sharp. Too sharp. Not angry, which Starfire has seen before, but defensive. “Fix-It wanted to make me all robot.”

“But I do not…” Starfire stops herself because she is on Earth. She is on Earth, and things are different here.

“What?”

“I do not wish to disrespect Earth’s culture.”

“Earth has got a lot of cultures. Shoot.”

When she looks at him blankly, he explains. That ‘shoot’ can also mean ‘talk,’ that he wants to know what she has to say.

“That makes no sense.”

“Doesn’t have to. What were you gonna say?”

“I do not think that someone who is all robot is less human.”

Instead of disagreeing, he picks up the robotic car again, grabs a screwdriver. His eyes are down, but Starfire knows that sometimes he looks away to think. That this is perhaps uncomfortable, and Starfire does not know why his body glows, or what happened to make him this way.

“But then, I am not sure I understand what ‘human’ means, only that you speak of it as something different than species or organic makeup.”

“It is.”

“I am not human.”

Cyborg looks up at her this time, something like surprise twisting his mouth open. “Star—”

“I am not. Raven is not. And Beast Boy is not always.”

“ _Being_ human is different. It’s like—it’s…” He goes quiet, his eyebrow slashing down.

“Would you tell me that I am less human, if I had prosthetics?”

“Well, _no,_ but—”

“Because I am not human, or because prosthetics do not diminish me?”

Cyborg just stares at her. As though this is news, as though no one has bothered to tell him before. And Starfire thinks this is long overdue, this conversation, because she is too familiar with people who try to make you _less._

“I will not ask why you have so many prosthetics.”

He says nothing.

“But I do not understand why they make you less human. On my planet, we have this word. Yar’nei.”

Cyborg ignores this, and she does not blame him. “Star, it’s the—the not _feeling._ Being human is _feeling._ You get that, right? Fix-It was trying to take that from me.”

“But why do we call it human, to feel? I am not—”

Cyborg’s hands are tight on the screwdriver, the robotic car. “I know you’re not. But this is _different._ ”

“But I do not understand why.”

“Because I didn’t _want him to._ ” The car falls to the floor, and the garage echoes with the sound of it. Ripples and ripples of anger. “I didn’t _want him to take that away from me._ ”

Starfire understands this better. “Then your issue is not with what makes you human. It is with consent.”

It is like a tripped wire, the way that Cyborg breaks down. Soft and then loud, and Starfire feels him reaching for her, reaching, reaching, and she reaches back because this all she could do for Ry.

Gentle brushes when the Psions were not looking.

Starfire understands these tears.

“Shit,” he says into her shoulder, and she rubs circles over his forehead, across the warm skin, unsure what he can feel through his prosthetics, but then she decides she does not care. She holds hard onto his shoulder and makes sure that he knows it. That she is not uncomfortable with this body he never asked for.

“I did not always have starbolts.”

“You”—sob—“didn’t?”

“I did not want them.”

She does not cry because she has not cried since the Gordanians. One day, she might remember how to do it. One day, she might accept that it is not _rutha._ One day, she might tell Cyborg how well she knows this pain.

But today she lets him reach for her, reach for understanding of what it means to be human, when she is not, when she thinks that human is the wrong word for what this is.

Starfire does not know what it means to be human, but she also does not particularly care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there's ever an issue with the way I tackle a sensitive topic such as race, disability, sexual orientation, gender, etc., please let me know! I want to keep growing as a person and as a writer ^.^


	8. Nimble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: Pre-Season 1, post Go
> 
> POV: Robin
> 
> The team is mostly settled into their dynamic by the time season 1 rolls around, but it’s fun to think about the roommate quirks of teens with superpowers. Also the last chapter was heavy, and I wanted to balance that with some humor

Robin is used to living with superheroes. It’s part of the gig when you’re Batman’s sidekick, when Tim is tame compared to Jason, when Bruce is something else entirely. Roommates with paranoia and rigid routines and house rules that are not usually subject to negotiation, roommates who sleep with batarangs beneath their pillows and are prone to backflipping down the stairs for breakfast, roommates who are loose with Gotham villains and boundaries and definitions of _normal._

After half a decade in the Batcave, Robin thinks Jump City will be easy, that this new team and Tower can’t be half as bad as _that._ And he expects some fights, kinks to work out because they’re five teenagers with trauma and PTSD. (And he knows they are after he writes up their background files, after he pins down their names and their histories and figures out that no one got off easy.)

So when Beast Boy and Cyborg start screaming about dinner ten minutes after official move-in, when the Tower stills smells like fresh construction and new paint, Robin takes a deep breath. And resolves himself to peacekeeper.

Robin is used to living with superheroes, but half of _these_ superheroes aren’t human. Half of these superheroes have only half-figured out their powers, and only half-figured out what they should and shouldn’t do around normal people, and only half-figured out that living with roommates requires some compromise. (Robin thought Jason was a lot of work, but this is somehow worse.)

“What makes you the leader?” Cyborg snorts during their first team exercise, and Robin tries to explain that he’s _not_ the leader. He’s just…experienced. A lot more experienced than everyone but Beast Boy, but Beast Boy is still mostly a child and hasn’t figured out that he’s allowed to have opinions on this team.

Robin hasn’t had the pleasure of meeting the Doom Patrol, but he has concerns. When Beast Boy throws himself in front of a laser for Robin on the obstacle course and gets knocked out for half an hour.

“I would have been fine,” Robin tells him in the Med-Bay, fingers pinched over the bridge of his nose, trying to figure out how to tell this _kid_ that the Titans aren’t about self-sacrifice.

“You’re the leader, dude. Gotta make sure you’re around to finish the mission. I’m expendable.”

Robin doesn’t know what to do with that.

Most of the time it’s manageable. Most of the time, it’s short tempers at six am, when Starfire is singing in the tradition of her planet, playing something like off-key bagpipes, and Raven looks like literal murder, and the window has cracks in it from black magic, which means Robin has to replace it _again._ Most of the time, it’s Cyborg loudly reminding everyone that he’s the oldest on the team, which means he should get to say “Titans Go” the next time Cinderblock shows up, and Robin has to remind him that leading isn’t about _that._ That it’s the responsibility of the teams’ lives, that it’s making calls no one else wants to, that—

“No one asked you,” Cyborg says, and convinces Beast Boy to help him with target practice instead.

The fridge is constantly at war. A mix of things that _do not go together,_ but Starfire wanted to recreate nar’laqi, and Cyborg refuses to not have ribs in the freezer, and Beast Boy keeps shoving everything off the top shelf for ‘vegetarian foods.’

“I just want _one shelf_ for my stuff.”

“Someone drank my tea,” says Raven, which begins a week-long crusade before Robin realizes he drank it accidentally, Monday night when he ran out of coffee and needed something to keep him awake while he was on conference calls with the mayor of Jump.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Raven retaliates by ignoring him for three days. Which is awkward only because she ordered stacks of books online, and Robin is too tired to knock on her door to tell her they finally arrived. Thirty hardback covers in Latin, and also a basket of incense and oils.

He doesn’t know where she got the money.

Most of the time it’s manageable. Most of the time, Robin thinks this is _good,_ and he’s happy (happier than he was in Gotham). Most of the time, Robin is good at playing mediator between Starfire and Raven and good at talking Cyborg through his _should-be_ and _don’t-want-to-be_ crises. Most of the time, Robin can work around their quirks and idiosyncrasies.

But Beast Boy’s strange propensity for perching is going to be the death of him.

“Gr _aghh._ ”

“Geez, Rob, I wasn’t _doing_ anything,” Beast Boys says, dropping lightly to the ground from his perch atop the fridge, and his green eyes are reflective in the dark until Robin hits the light switch. “I was just thinking.”

“At three. In the morning. On top of the fridge.”

“Um. Yeah.”

Robin pours his fourth cup of coffee and leaves.

Most of the time it’s manageable, but Beast Boy bombards him with water balloons from the ceiling fan, too late in the evening when Robin really just wants to sit with the newspaper and breathe.

“Ha. Ha.”

“I got you _so good._ ”

“What are you even doing up there?” he asks, looking up at Beast Boy’s rotating face, which is shit-faced glee.

“Cy bet me ten bucks I couldn’t catch you off guard.”

Which is a separate conversation entirely.

Most of the time it’s manageable, but Robin is _not_ a fan of people trying to intentionally startle him. And Beast Boy seems to like that he can, which Robin figures is a side effect of Mento and not being allowed to have fun.

That doesn’t mean he has to like it.

On Monday, he finds Beast Boy balanced precariously on the staircase bannister that leads to the basement, his legs crossed, eyes closed.

“Make another bet with Cyborg?” Robin asks, even though Beast Boy has not moved since the door opened.

“Trying to meditate.”

“Aren’t you uncomfortable?” Robin asks, remembering the beams that he practiced on, the cut of the trapeze bar beneath his knees. “Balancing like that?”

“Nah.”

On Wednesday, Robin watches Beast Boy cook his black bean burger while crouched atop the stove, his feet carefully arranged around the hot pan. Cyborg and Raven, sitting on the couch with a chess board between them, do not seem concerned by this. Starfire, when she floats in with an encyclopedia from the middle of the alphabet, acts as if this is normal.

So Robin tries not to scream when he finds Beast Boy balanced across the shower ledge too early in the morning, or when he is perched on the sill above Cyborg’s sliding door, or when he has somehow positioned himself on a ledge outside the common room window, looking out at the ocean with a bittersweet smile.

He’s the damn peacekeeper on this team, and Beast Boy’s constant fidgeting around the Tower, trying to get comfortable, is not _supposed_ to annoy him. It’s not on purpose.

“Okay, okay,” says Beast Boy the next time they encounter each other at three am. “I’ll stop thinking on top of the fridge. Wouldn’t it be easier if you just bought a Keurig for your room?”

And it’s not until the team’s first one-on-one sparring session, after Robin swings his bo staff and Beast Boy nimbly balances himself on the tip of the metal, that he finally reassesses the potential of a teammate with a strange propensity for perching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Found this in my drafts folder and just cleaned it up a bit. Robin is such a good leader, when he remembers not to take everything so seriously ^.^
> 
> Come say hi in the comments! I'm always open to requests, but I can't promise I'll write them (unless they hit that inspiration sweet spot).


	9. Undercover

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: Before Deception
> 
> POV: Cyborg
> 
> Got a Cy/Rob friendship request and felt like exploring this aspect of their dynamic. The undercover identities that they had as Red-X and Stone. And, since it takes place right before season 3, the tension between their leadership styles is at a breaking point.

“Hey, do you have a minute to talk?”

It happens too early in the morning, when Cyborg has too much sweat leaking down his face. He needs to towel off before it wrecks his circuits. Waterproof armor, but sweat is something else. Something damn annoying, and his mind is wrecked after two hours of high-intensity interval training. He doesn’t want to talk. Doesn’t have the energy to.

“Can it wait, Rob?” he asks, reaching for the foam mat wall to rest for a second; his reflection stares back at him heaving.

This is a regular thing. This thing with the two of them. They’re the only ones who need to keep themselves competitive, the only who ones who fall back on hand-to-hand when they’re cornered. So this is a five a.m. tradition when the rest of the team is still asleep, but Cyborg doesn’t talk when they’re done. Cyborg heads straight to the showers and lets the steam wash out the angry because workouts feel different when he can’t build muscle.

And he’s not that patient when Robin slips into leader mode and lets the condescending out. Like Cyborg doesn’t understand what it means to be a hero just because he started later than nine years old.

Just because he didn’t learn from Batman and Gotham.

“No,” says Robin.

And shit, that’s his leader voice. The one where he talks down, like he’s got so much practice at being a mentor. Vic’s had a lot of shit mentors in his life, starting with his football coach, ending with Silas Stone. He’s not looking for another one.

“I need to shower before my sweat gets into everything,” he says, wrapping a towel around his neck. “So it’ll have to wait.”

“I wanted to talk about Stone.”

This pulls him up short. He hesitates just long enough to look at Robin and notice the way his shoulders are pulled into his neck. Like he’s puffing himself up to sound intimidating. Cyborg throws his sweat towel into the laundry hamper before saying, “I’m still working on Cyborg 2.0. And the holo-ring won’t be done for another week or two.”

“It’s not about that.” Robin leans sideways to make eye contact with Cyborg’s reflection in the gym mirror, which isn’t even eye contact because he never takes off that damn mask.

Sometimes, Cyborg hates him for it. That he can strip off his hero identity whenever he wants and _doesn’t_. Robin never takes off the mask or the cloak or the persona of team leader, and Cyborg doesn’t get that choice.

He’s got this body, and that’s it.

“Then what do you want?” Yeah, he’s tilting fast into a bad mood. If he could just get into the shower and breathe in the steam, if he could just reset, plug into his charging table and forget everything until breakfast when he’s got some eggs and sausage, and Beast Boy’s yelling about waffles, and the room is just a little lighter because Robin doesn’t get like this around the others.

“I just wanted to check in with how you’re feeling about going undercover.”

“And you couldn’t do it at breakfast?”

Robin’s mask tightens around the edges as he shifts again, as he moves to stand between Cyborg and the exit door. Not even subtle about it. “I didn’t want it to be uncomfortable for Beast Boy.”

“For Beast Boy?”

“You’ll be infiltrating the HIVE,” Robin says slowly, like he’s waiting for Cyborg to _get_ it. “Like Terra did with—”

“Got it. Yeah.”

“And I’ve done this before. I know how… _addictive_ …it can be.”

But this is another reason why Cyborg hates him sometimes. The way that Robin’s ego is so inflated on his own arrogance that he slipped into Red-X and didn’t think he should tell them. Not even Cyborg, who’s supposed to their back-up leader.

“Yeah, well, I’m doing this with the team. Shouldn’t be that hard if I’m checking in every day.”

 _Not like you,_ he doesn’t say.

Robin hears the accusation anyway. “I know it’s different. I know you’ll have us, if something goes wrong, but I just wanted to warn you. About having a secret identity that doesn’t have to follow the rules.”

It sounds like Robin’s problem, though. Cyborg’s never had a hard time with rules. Always been a team player, always put them first, always been pretty good at doing things by the book. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep it in mind.”

Except when he tries to move for the door, Robin side-steps. Right in front of him. They’re so close that Cyborg can see the slow blink of his eyelashes against the white film of the mask. It makes Robin seem realer, somehow. More than just a costume.

“I just want you to know that you can talk to me about it. Once you’re in there, if it gets to be too much. If you start feeling like you don’t want to leave…”

“Yeah, don’t think that’s gonna be a problem.” He thinks about not saying it. He really, really does. “I’m not like you. I know who my family is.”

Robin winces. Takes a step back. “Red-X was a mistake. I know that now. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how dangerous it is to be undercover.”

It’s not undercover because Stone is what Cyborg should be. Victor Stone. The kind of undercover that Robin doesn’t know anything about.

“Once you’re in there, once you’re about to get what you want, you’re not going to think about anything else. You’re going to want to finish the mission. You’re going to want to _stay_ because it’s easier to be someone else.”

“Yeah,” says Cyborg, feeling that hard, bitter pit in his stomach. The one he hasn’t felt in a while. “Except it’s not ‘someone else’ for me, is it. Not like it was for you.”

If Robin had just waited until after he showered, Cyborg thinks this could have gone better. But he’s angry now. Angry and tired of Robin’s bullshit excuses for what he did to pin down Slade. So this time when he tries to leave, he shoulders Robin aside and doesn’t care that it’s uncalled for.

“So thanks for the warning,” he says, “but I’ll be just fine.”

The door slides open, and Cyborg has a split second where he wants to turn around and head back into the gym. Punch out the feelings, but he can’t do that with Robin there. He needs to cool down.

“Cyborg!”

“Could have waited half an hour,” he mumbles under his breath, walking down the hallway. The fluorescent pads light up beneath his feet, and it’s quiet this early. No one around but the two of them. “Half an hour, and this would’ve been a hell of a lot easier.”

“Cyborg, wait!”

When Cyborg pivots on his heels, he thinks he’ll start yelling. He doesn’t have a lot of patience left, not when Robin is pushing all of his buttons before he’s even showered, but something about the shake of Robin’s hands makes him hesitate.

“What?”

Robin’s voice cracks. “I know I can go back to my life. My other life. And I know you can’t.”

 _Rub it in,_ he thinks.

“I know Stone is…different. But I don’t want to go back to being who I was before. That kid—he doesn’t have anyone. He doesn’t—” Robin’s voice chokes off.

Cyborg’s never heard him even _allude_ to a real name before. An identity he had before this one.

“And maybe the HIVE won’t be so hard for you. Maybe you know who you are, and I… I just wanted to warn you. Undercover is addictive for me. I don’t want to see it happen to you.”

And for the first time, Cyborg realizes that Red-X isn’t the only identity that Robin is addicted to. He opens his mouth, feels his tongue hit the back of his teeth in search of words. “Rob…”

“That’s all I wanted to say. I’ll…um…let you shower.”

Robin turns around, back to the sliding gym doors, before Cyborg can come up with any response that makes this moment okay. So he just stands in the hallway, not moving, until the fluorescent pads shut off, and he waits for those words in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi in the comments! I'm open to requests if the inspiration hits just right.


	10. Fool

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Forces of Nature
> 
> POV: Starfire
> 
> I’ve seen a lot of fanfic in which Beast Boy lies to Starfire about Earth traditions for a good joke, but I thought it would be so much sweeter and lovely if it was mutual. If Starfire lies to him about Tamaranean traditions just as often.

Perhaps it is wicked, but Starfire likes to see what Beast Boy is willing to believe about Tamaran. White lies, small pranks now that she understands how they work, easy ways to make a fool of someone who is not afraid of looking foolish. It is not intentionally vindictive, not at first, but after the motor oil balloon incident, she is looser with her long-winded stories of home.

“I have to wear a hat…made of…chocolate pudding and bath bubbles?” Beast Boy asks with an expression of abject horror, barely a week after he apologized crying while digging through rocks, and Starfire squeezes her smile between her teeth.

“While dancing.”

“Is there a specific dance I have to learn?”

“Only a song you must sing while doing so.”

“And this is how you say sorry on Tamaran?”

She nods because she does not trust herself to speak aloud, not when the giggles are bright and bubbly in her throat, and Beast Boy looks so _earnest._ His face screwed up with concentration as he whips the pudding together in a bowl and clogs the sink to fill it up with bubbles.

“I mean, if that’s what it takes. I just can’t believe you guys eat pudding too.”

“We do not use it for eating,” she lies smoothly, lifting into the air because happiness makes her float. When Starfire looks over to the common room windows, all bright blue and white fluff, she sees Raven making a face at both of them from the couch. But Starfire holds up a finger her to her lips behind Beast Boy’s back.

 _Do not ruin my fun,_ it says.

Raven hides her smirk behind the cover of her book and says nothing, and Starfire thanks Xhal that it is only the three of them today. Cyborg would not be able to keep himself from laughing and taking pictures, which would ruin the seriousness with which Beast Boy is taking this.

“I’ll set the timer for an hour, yeah?” Beast Boy says, shoving the pudding bowl into the fridge.

“It does not have to be fully set before you mix it with the bubbles.”

“Okay. So, teach me the song while we wait.” He nods, eyebrows all tight together because he is trying so _hard_ to be respectful of her culture. Ever since she told him how much she missed Tamaran and how tired she was of his eyes glazing over when she wanted to talk about it, he has been trying harder to listen. She knows _now_ that he has the ADHD and difficulty focusing, but for so many weeks she thought he was not interested in her stories of home.

For a moment, she feels a pulse of guilt for abusing his trust like this. Now that he is making a concerted effort to learn her holidays and language, she is taking advantage. But no—no, Starfire remembers last month when he told her all bright-eyed and silver-tongued that it is customary to tell knock-knock jokes before opening any door.

She made a fool of herself in a public restroom at the mall of shopping because of him, so chocolate pudding and bath bubbles seems like fair retribution.

“Iam pou’pi fay sah,” she tells him slowly, writing out the fake words on a napkin so that it is not so immediately obvious.

“I’m a poopy face,” Beast Boy repeats, head tilted to one side as though he does not hear the ridiculousness of this entire situation.

Raven turns her snort into a sneeze and buries deeper into her book, and Starfire knows that she is trying not to laugh.

“Your pronunciation is very good,” Starfire tells Beast Boy kindly. “Would you say it one more time?”

“I’m a poopy face.”

If only she had the disposable camera Robin had given her for Christmas, Starfire would burn through its entire film to capture this memory forever. An hour later, when Beast Boy slides her uniform over his black one-piece and coats his hair with pudding and bubbles, swaying back and forth in front of the fridge.

“I’m so sorry I hit you with the motor oil balloon,” Beast Boy sings, shaking his hips so quickly that pudding slides down his back and onto the floor. “I’m a poopy face. I’m so sorry it took so long to apologize. I’m a poopy face.”

“I thought this apology traditionally took place on top of a table,” Raven says, looking up from her book with a barely suppressed smile.

Beast Boy shimmies his shoulders and bares his fangs in a grin. “No way, Rae. You’ve had to do this too?”

“Mmhmm.”

“I’m a poopy face,” Beast Boy sings, climbing onto the counter in thigh-high purple boots, soap bubbles spilling onto the granite. “I’m a poopy face—hey, how many times do I have to sing this?”

“I believe one hundred is customary,” says Raven before Starfire can answer, and they catch each other’s eye and go red-faced and tight-lipped. “For every day of the Tamaranean calendar.”

“I’m a poopy face,” Beast Boy chirps, kicking one leg up and grinning like the fool. “I’m a poopy face.”

This is perhaps too close to the line of wicked, but Starfire knows that he is having fun, that he likes being silly for her. He does not seem to mind that he loses count at fifty-nine and has to start over, and he does not seem to mind when Raven tells him his head is looking bare and needs another layer of soap bubbles.

“Join me?” Beast Boy asks Raven after pudding spills onto her cloak, and her sleeves are frothed with bubbles.

“No, I think—”

“Come on, it’s for Star! It’s a Tamaranean tradition!”

“Beast Boy—”

“ _Please._ It’s more fun if I’m not doing it alone. Sing with _meeeee._ ”

“I’m not the one who has to apologize.”

But Beast Boy knocks Raven’s elbow into the pudding bowl, spilling it all over Starfire’s lap, and laughs his high-pitched laugh. “Whoops!”

“Azar, I’m sorry—”

And this is what makes Starfire lose composure and burst into manic giggles, floating another six inches higher as the joy rips through her. Her first successful prank, and Beast Boy’s expression when she admits it—indignant and then proud and exhilarated—is worth everything.

“You _pranked_ me?” he realizes, all awe-faced and happy.

“You look like a mop’far grogunta,” she laughs, breathing so hard that the world goes bright and hazy with light. “Xhal, I cannot believe how _gullible—_ ”

“You’re like a blackbelt prankster! Oh my god, Star, how’d you keep a straight face—?”

“Oh, I wish I had my camera!”

Perhaps it is wicked, but it is never vindictive or mean. And Beast Boy is too light-hearted to ever be hurt by a joke, especially when he gives as good as he gets.

“Please pass the salt,” Starfire says the next morning during breakfast as she stirs her gran’ba xanthum on the stove, and Beast Boy hands her the sugar because he is petty, and the liquid curdles.

“I wouldn’t eat that,” he says, propping his chin on top of her shoulder to look into the saucepan.

“It was supposed to be a Tamaranean hand lotion,” she lies, and Beast Boy lets her apply it all over his arms because he gets excited at the thought of trying it.

“Smells kind of weird, though,” he says eventually, after it’s all soaked in.

And Starfire gets to smile big and smug and whisper, “That is because it is a zorkaberry fertilizer made of seagull droppings.”

Perhaps they should have trust issues with each other after weeks of this, but they love each other too much to ever be paranoid. So when he hands her a soup spoon and asks her to try it, when she tells him about the traditional crown of Blorthog, when he offers to pick up her shampoo while he’s in town, when she convinces him to spend an entire day not speaking—

Of course they always say yes.

Because neither one of them is afraid of being made the fool. Not if it’s being foolish with each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lol, I wrote this while trying to write a Rob/Star short. I write too much angst, so I figured I'd try something different. (Also BB/Star is mayyyyybe my favorite friendship combo of the Titans.) Come say hi in the comments!


	11. Forward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Aftershock
> 
> Starfire lost a friend, too. I thought she might grieve differently than the others.

After Slade disappears beneath the hot magma of memories better left untouched, and Terra hardens into a husk of her former self, Starfire does what she always does.

She looks forward.

It is a simple solution, the only solution that has allowed her to experience this off-brand version of home and happy. She looks forward because it is the only direction that means _better._ Better, with luck. With people who have not yet betrayed her.

Perhaps she should be wary after a history of loving those who do not deserve it. _Runfar_ who bend around, between, away from her. People who are too willing to push her into the chains of hurt and pain, but life is so much kinder if she refuses to look back. If she refuses to give names to those who have broken her, who have harmed her in ways she would not like to ever repeat.

Her people are not the kind to have regrets.

And as soon as the memorial is over, she does not look back.

“Want to visit her statue with me?” Beast Boy asks in the aftermath of anger, and Starfire says no.

Terra was a friend, _is_ a friend, but Beast Boy is looking to drown in a cold sea of memories. She wants nothing to do with it, even if the numbness in his eyes almost makes her change her mind. Starfire looks forward, and there is no use talking about what they should have done differently, what they should have noticed, what they should have said when Terra asked to rejoin the team.

“I knew something was wrong,” says Raven in the middle of one of their meditations, sharp and sudden. “I should have told Robin the second I felt her mind.”

Raven deserves someone who can help her sort through her knot of anger and guilt and reluctant affection, but Starfire is not that person. She says it as nicely as she can. She does not wish to talk about Terra. Not unless she is alive.

“I’m sorry,” says Raven, which is not something she says often, and Starfire waves it aside.

“Perhaps you will find a resolution in your meditation mirror.”

Starfire looks forward because Jump City is full of small and beautiful things that make her remember _why_ she is here. Sometimes there are moments when she is _rutha_ , when she is wistful, moments when that small bitter seed inside of her starts to grow again. But for the most part, more often than not, Starfire refuses to let the dead, the missing, and the gone pull her back into screaming.

She screamed for a very long time in space, when green energy was sucked into her skin, when her sister turned jagged, when her brother lost words. On Earth, she does not want to.

On Earth, she wishes to float in rainclouds and breathe in the smell of hope, which is wet and damp and warm. She does not understand why the others are so quiet when there are so many wonderful things to look forward to. So many wonderful moments to make.

Beast Boy refuses to stay in his human form, as though canine emotions dull the pain. Cyborg will not leave the garage, and Raven only pretends to meditate. The team will not go to the pizza shop since Terra turned into stone, and they allow the memories to sour the taste of cheese and dough. But it is Robin that worries Starfire the most, and it is Robin that she finally talks to.

Even if she would rather not talk about Terra.

“Come,” she says to him in the research room, sticking her hand out so steadfastly that he will not dare say no.

He does not. He stands and follows her without saying anything, which is many times worse than Beast Boy crying.

As they walk through the park, the grass damp from a recent storm, water droplets plinking from the boughs of trees, Starfire points out beautiful things to Robin. The pale, barely-there arc of a rainbow over the skyscrapers in the distance. A small ladybug that flitters over her finger and rubs its wings together. The chittering of two squirrels racing across mud and branches.

“Very cute,” Robin says, his thoughts faded into somewhere she cannot follow.

He is not listening, so she fits her hand into his and squeezes hard. Just enough for him to feel it. _Right now._

“Hey!”

“Terra is not here,” she says very firmly. “I am.”

One day, Starfire would like to see behind Robin’s mask. Today she only imagines his eyes coming back to her. To reality.

Though he does not say anything, he squeezes her hand back. They continue walking through the park, winding through parents with their children. Starfire notices him wince every time a blonde girl races past, or when some thin-limbed teenager goes sprinting after a frisbee, but she squeezes his hand again.

And again.

And again.

She brings him back.

She brings him back when the memories are too much, the same way Komand’r once did for her. Bursts of _right now_ so that he looks forward and sees this moment for what it is. A hot, sunshine day beneath the warm drops of leftover rain.

They are both alive, and of all her family, Starfire needs Robin to understand this about her.

That she can’t slow down, lest the memories overtake her.

That she can’t look back.

That she has been broken down and burned by betrayal and bitterness, and if she ever stops moving, she will lose herself to screaming.

These words are too hard to say, so she does not. She only squeezes his hand and hopes that he will see her very determined, defiant smile for what it is. The one that says, _Terra will not break me._

_She was not the first to try._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come yell at me in the comments!


	12. Circus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: after How Long is Forever
> 
> I think I've seen this done before, but what else is fanfiction for? Time for my own take on it.

When the circus rolls through Jump City like clockwork in the summer, a streak of stardust and wonder, Beast Boy spends a long time sitting on his rock by the ocean. He has been through terrible things, and the circus is not one of them. It won’t _be_ one of them because Starfire came back with Warp’s clock, and that timeline is never happening.

Still.

Still, some version of himself lived through it. Some thirty-five-year-old Beast Boy lost himself behind the safety of bars and freakshows, and that’s hard to get over. Even if it’s not terrible like the terrible things he’s actually lived through.

The terrible things he’s done to survive. The terrible people who made him.

And when the circus posters are everywhere all weekend, and it’s a Friday evening too balmy and perfect to be real, Cyborg asks the team to go. A night to relax, like they haven’t in a while, like they haven’t since Robin disappeared into the shadows as someone else’s apprentice.

“No thanks,” Beast Boy says, gesturing at the TV where he’s got a new video game up and running. “Got all the entertainment I need right here.”

“You sure? You usually love this kind of thing.”

“I’m good. Just want a night all to myself, you know?”

“Actually,” says Robin, expression unreadable behind the mask, “I think I’ll stay home too.”

Starfire makes a fuss about it, saying that he has been in the research room too much the last few weeks, that he should not pull away from them, that the team has forgiven him for what he did in orange and black, that—

“I won’t be researching. I’ll be playing video games with Beast Boy.”

“You…will?”

“If that’s okay.”

Beast Boy is not known for being observant, but something about the forced indifference of the entire conversation makes him tilt his head. Not that he knows _why_ Robin doesn’t want him alone tonight, or _why_ Robin refuses to look at the circus poster, or _why_ nobody else on the team thinks it’s weird.

But it’s enough to put him on edge.

“Um. Sure. I’ve got Edge of the World, Duality, MegaMonkey: Unleashed…”

When the other three leave around eight, when the sky is still a pale blue rimmed with summer yellow and Starfire’s excitement has burned through the hesitation, Beast Boy figures that it won’t be so bad, just the two of them.

With Robin here, he can’t sit on his rock chewing on memories he doesn’t actually have. He can’t scroll through the circus Wikipedia page until his brain goes fuzzy and strange and tries to fill in the future with experiences he’s never even lived.

Anyway, Robin’s a lot more fun when he’s not trying to keep everyone else happy. He doesn’t care so much that Beast Boy knows he’s less than perfect.

He’s not perfect.

He’s a long way from perfect.

But that’s never bothered Beast Boy.

“You don’t like the circus?” Robin asks barely five minutes after Raven has portaled the others into the city. It’s unnervingly casual. Robin’s looking at the video game screen instead of at Beast Boy, which means he’s trying not to scare him away.

Beast Boy isn’t sure why this question should scare him away, or what scares Robin so much about the circus, but no one has talked about Warp since Starfire came home. Beast Boy isn’t sure he wants to. “Don’t know, actually. I’ve never been.”

Robin makes a humming sound in his throat as his gloves dance over the video game controller and send Beast Boy’s character flying off the screen. The music sounds a lot too happy and jingly for whatever the hell this conversation is. “I used to love the circus.”

“Really?”

“Mm.”

“So…” Beast Boy feels something skew sideways between them, like they’re on the precipice of falling. “Why didn’t you go?”

“Why didn’t you?”

It’s not really fair, turning the conversation around. Especially when Robin’s a freaking brick wall about personal questions. Every couple of weeks, Beast Boy tries asking him something new. Favorite color. What state he’s from. How long he’s known Batman. If he still talks to Batman.

Not that he ever gets an answer.

“Guess I haven’t felt so great about circuses since Warp,” Beast Boy admits. He likes to be honest around Robin. Figures eventually it’ll go both ways.

“Mm.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with them, or… I don’t know. Just don’t like feeling like a freakshow.”

Robin’s mask scrunches up, which Beast Boy spends so much time noticing that his avatar dies on the TV screen.

“You’re not a freakshow.”

Beast Boy shrugs. “Well, _I_ know that. You know that. Most people don’t.”

“Circuses aren’t about freakshows,” Robin says, which isn’t addressing anything Beast Boy just said. But his voice is very, very serious.

“I didn’t say it was?”

“They’re about—performance. Art. Laughter. Human connection. And—and family, lots of the time. Most of the time.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“And to show that it’s okay to be _different._ That it’s okay to be _visible._ ”

“I _know,_ but—"

“Get up,” Robin says very firmly, and he turns the TV off.

If Beast Boy hadn’t been losing, he might have minded. “Hey!”

“Come on.”

“What are you—?”

“We’re going to the circus.”

In the full year that Beast Boy has known Robin, he’s never seen him quite like this. Bright-eyed and feverish, like something’s gone and inhabited the dry husk of his body. Which should be unnerving, probably, but when Robin starts smiling (big and reckless), Beast Boy figures this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“Yeah—yeah, let me just get my comm so we can let the others know—”

“Nope.” Robin leans in, his face mischievous and wild. “Just you and me. We’re getting the best seats in the house.”

“I—what?”

“Ever watched the show from the rafters?”

“No, I’ve never been to the—”

“Come on! Don’t want to miss anything!”

Beast Boy thinks he just walked into a fever dream, a bright and colorful hallucination. And sometimes his brain does that, skips continuity and mushes all the pieces together in an order that doesn’t make sense, but flying over the tall ocean waves and glittering lights, he figures he’d rather not wake up.

Robin is someone different.

Someone he’s never met before.

He’s loud and childish and shit-faced, and even though he ignores all of Beast Boy’s questions, he starts talking nonstop as soon as they land in Jump City and can see the show lights in the distance. Running his mouth like a nine-year-old on a sugar high.

“I’m going to teach you how to love the circus, okay? Because I can’t have any of my friends hating it. That’s _my_ problem, and I’m getting _over it._ For you. Got it?”

“Um.”

“This way—”

Robin goes flying up the side of the building that Jump City uses for a variety of events, and tonight it’s decorated in bright reds and greens and yellows for the circus. When Beast Boy shifts into a sparrow to catch up, he notices how easily Robin blends in with the colors. Almost like—

“Here,” says Robin, gesturing toward a latched window several stories up. “We’ll be able to hide up here.”

“So…we’re not buying tickets?”

“Shhhh, it’s _starting._ ”

As Beast Boy follows him inside, into the rafters where they perch on enormous wooden beams over the ring below, he completely forgets about Warp.

He completely forgets the timeline that isn’t happening.

Because he and Robin are crouched in the shadows just outside the glow of infectious fun and confetti, the ruffles of satin and glitter costumes, the curved lines of aerial silks, the arc of bodies along trapezes and tightropes, and _this—_

God, this isn’t anything like the cage and peanuts Starfire told him about. It’s an imagination-induced high that lights his brain up in pretty colors, and the ringmaster’s voice carries just fine up here. It’s familiar and warm, and Beast Boy _knows_ that voice because it’s _Robin’s_ voice.

Cock-sure and efficient, pulling people along into the fever dream with him, making sure no one gets left behind or left out, and even though Robin’s not talking anymore, Beast Boy finally fits that last puzzle piece into place.

Green and red and yellow. The way he flies through the air without wings.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” Robin whispers halfway through the show, and even with his mask lodged into place, Beast Boy can see straight through it. Can see the awestruck rapture that’s two shades to the left of longing.

“Yeah,” Beast Boy says, but this time he’s looking at Robin. Looking at how much _younger_ he is when he’s lost in memories, when he’s letting his costume be a bright distraction like it’s supposed to be.

“Ahhh, that’ll be the fire-breathers up next. Star will like them.”

“Hey, Rob?”

“Hm.”

“I don’t hate the circus.”

Robin looks away from the show to stare at Beast Boy, his mouth all small and puckered like he’s surprised this has actually worked. And Beast Boy doesn’t want to distract him for long, doesn’t want to miss any part of this chaotic, glorious mess, so he just says _thanks._

He says _thanks_ and watches the circus until Warp’s timeline gets rewritten in show lights. Show lights and secrets that he won’t make Robin say out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to balance the POVs and characters, but they may tilt ever so slightly toward Beast Boy. He's my emotional support character.


	13. Different

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Mad Mod
> 
> Because sometimes you need that extra shove to go get assessed.

Cyborg doesn’t expect Mad Mod, of all people, to be the reason that he finally takes Beast Boy to a psychologist.

Maybe it’s that high school (even a British one) reminds Cyborg of Jerry Watson spacing out in math class. Maybe it’s that Beast Boy goes quiet anytime anyone mentions school, like it’s left a sour taste in his mouth. Or maybe it’s just the realization that the kid can’t get anything done without someone babysitting him, unless it’s video games or missions. Like he can’t focus on anything that’s not sprinkled with serotonin and/or an adrenaline rush.

It’s an overdue realization, by a lot too much now that Cyborg is looking back on everything and seeing how all the pieces fit together. Sure, the kid’s young. Sure, he’s hyperactive and always got his head in the clouds, and it’s not until after half a day running around a high school illusion that Cyborg understands _why._

“Hey, B,” he says on the walk back to the Tower, after they’ve handed Mad Mod off the police. They do that sometimes, when the weather is nice, and Robin wants the team to look more approachable. Walking and hitting up the pizza shop like normal teenagers. “You ever gotten looked at for a learning disability?”

“What?”

“Or a neurodevelopmental disorder or—”

“No, I wasn’t listening. What’d you ask?”

God, he should have said something months ago. “Learning disabilities. Neurodevelopmental disorders.”

“What, like autism?”

Cyborg gives a half shrug, lowering his voice so that the rest of the team doesn’t descend on the conversation like vultures. “Can be. Or dyslexia or ADHD or—whatever.”

“Steve said that ADHD isn’t real.”

Cyborg doesn’t know who Steve is, but his stomach drops like a stone. “Sure it is. I had lots of classmates with ADHD.”

Beast Boy just shrugs, like he doesn’t really care enough to argue. “Do you think I’d be good at high school?”

It whacks Cyborg out of left field, and he loses the line of questioning. “What, you mean you haven’t—?”

“Homeschooled. Um, for a while. Steve said I wasn’t smart enough, so we stopped after fifth grade math.”

Cyborg’s stomach drops harder, and this time it feels like anger. “ _What?_ ”

“That’s probably why Mad Mod got me so bad with the hypno-screens, right? Me not being smart enough.”

“No,” says Cyborg hotly. “That’s not why—"

But Beast Boy gets distracted by the pizza shop up ahead and shifts into a beagle before Cyborg can get the sentence out.

It’s not the end of the conversation. Cyborg won’t _let it_ be the end of the conversation because apparently Beast Boy has spent the last fourteen years of his life thinking he’s dumb, which he’s not. He’s street-smart and intuitive, and Cyborg can’t believe that _Steve_ is such an asshole that Beast Boy doesn’t _know_ that.

Whoever the _fuck_ Steve is.

The more Cyborg thinks about it, the more he’s sure that he needs to pick up the phone and call someone about an assessment. Beast Boy is a neon-flashing sign of symptoms, screaming executive dysfunction like a photocopy of Jerry Watson. Especially the night after Mad Mod, when Robin orders the team to the common room for GED studying, and Beast Boy starts clicking his ballpoint pen and tapping his fingers and being a general nuisance who prevents anyone else from getting anything done.

“I can’t concentrate,” Raven says, her voice a taut line ready to snap. “If you’re going to click your pen, you can study in your room.”

“Oh.” Beast Boy blinks, as if he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. “Sorry.”

As soon as he gets the chance, Cyborg buys fidgets online because Jerry always had them in class. He slips them into Beast Boy’s desk when he’s on patrol with Robin and figures the kid won’t second-guess it. He’s short-sighted like that, usually assumes the bits and bobs in his room are from some mall outing with Starfire that he completely forgot about. Point being, the next time the team is holed up with textbooks and laptops, Beast Boy’s twirling a spinner in his right hand and _almost_ focused. It’s a long shot better than he usually is, and that’s when Cyborg starts getting ideas.

“Hey, B, remember when I asked you about learning disabilities?”

Beast Boy gets a wary look on his face and leans away, just enough that Cyborg notices. “Yeah.”

They’re sitting on the roof today, looking out over the ocean, which is gray and overcast. No blaring alarms for the last seventy-two hours, which has to be some kind of record. All Cyborg knows is that he’s been waiting to get this chance for too long. “I was just—thinking. Maybe we should go see someone. About your attention problems.”

“I’ve been doing _loads_ better during our study sessions,” Beast Boy says hotly, and then the words start falling out so fast that he trips over the letters. “I didn’t even click my pen or forget to—"

“—Beast Boy—”

“—finish the English reading, like I usually do, and I know I’m not that smart, but I’m not holding everyone up as much as I used to. There’s nothing _wrong_ with me.”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with you.”

“Yeah, you did. ‘Learning disability.’ Just a fancy way of saying I’m lazy, right?”

Cyborg gets a hard pit in his throat. “Steve’s an asshole.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You didn’t have to. You’re not lazy. And you’re not stupid. But I called Dr. Gerhart about, maybe, getting you an appointment.”

“Who’s Dr. Gerhart?”

“A psychiatrist.”

“I don’t like psychiatrists.”

“You ever talk to one?”

“No, but Steve says—”

“—that’s your problem. Steve’s an asshole.”

Beast Boy sits on his fingers, narrowing his eyes at the horizon like he’s thinking real damn hard. Cyborg just waits for him to find the words, which (based on experience) might be a while. Sometimes, when it’s just the two of them, Cyborg forgets they’re a long shot from normal. When it’s just the two of them, Cyborg thinks he wouldn’t give this up for anything.

“What is ADHD, exactly?” Beast Boy asks after a long stretch of nothing.

“Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Means you have a hard time keeping your attention on stuff you don’t care about. Sometimes makes your brain real busy and loud.”

“And you think I’ve got it.”

Cyborg shrugs. “Could be. Could be nothing. Dr. Gerhart could tell you better than me.”

“You said you knew people? With a, um, learning disability?”

“Jerry Watson. Emma Owens. A whole bunch of my football buddies had it in math. Dyscalculia or something.”

Beast Boy’s eyebrow are all tight together as he works through something real difficult, and Cyborg doesn’t know how long it’ll take to rewrite all the shit Steve told him. All he knows is that Beast Boy deserves to hear that nothing’s wrong with him.

Never was.

“You don’t think I’m lazy?” Beast Boy asks a good ten minutes later, rolling a stray thread around his fingers.

“I think your brain’s just wired a little different.” Cyborg knocks their shoulders together and gestures at their bodies. Silver metal and green skin. “But there’s nothing wrong with different.”

“Huh.”

Nothing wrong with normal, either, but Cyborg figures that’s a word that doesn’t really mean anything, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working on a Raven and Cyborg friendship piece, but not sure when I'll finish it.
> 
> Come yell at me in the comments!


	14. Touch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuity: After Car Trouble
> 
> Cyborg and Raven are just so *comfortable* around each other, ya know? So here’s my thought piece on it.

She doesn’t remember noticing it, the first time.

Her magic reaching out and getting tucked neatly back inside her, as he pulls his body away. Maybe it happens in the middle of healing, when her hands are warm with black energy and waiting to stitch up the long line of puckered flesh that runs down his cheekbone from the exploded shrapnel of superhero fights.

“I’ve got it,” he says dismissively, and he leaves before she can finish, a panicked and distant look in his eye.

Sometimes, she thinks she _should_ have noticed it a long time ago, but there’s something about being in a congested mass of other people’s feelings screaming that makes it a lot less noticeable. Too many unalphabetized files and stray paper thoughts for her to sort through, so when she starts to gravitate toward him, long evenings when they sit six inches apart in silent understanding, it doesn’t occur to her to wonder _why._

Sometimes at dinner, when his hand pulls back too fast from the saltshaker as she reaches for it, and he studies her from the corner of his eye, she thinks it is more than just considerate. He is so very careful not to brush their hands together, as if he has noticed her flinching away from Beast Boy’s thin green fingers and seen the ways they are the same. (Beast Boy is loose with his definitions of personal space, and even if his thoughts are fortified with steel walls and spikes, the wild in him is _loud._ A den of restless lions restrained in a five-foot cage.)

But it’s just a saltshaker. It’s just a loose hand and metal fingers. Raven doesn’t think much of it.

She thinks _something_ of it when he starts intercepting Starfire’s hugs, sliding between them in the aftermath of battles hard-won and wincing. Even though he shakes it off, she sees the subtlest of confessions for what it is. The tension of someone who does not like to be touched.

Maybe she notices it when he says her name to get her attention. Not tapping her shoulder, not bumping elbows. No, he usually goes around her, around and around until she sees him coming from ten feet away, and he makes eye contact and says, “Raven.”

“Raven,” like he’s taking extra care not to startle her, or himself.

She appreciates it enough (is curious enough) that she starts paying attention to the flinches he makes when no one is looking, the distant slide of his eyes to memories that no one else can see. She makes an effort to find other ways to love him (ways that do not involve touch), and this is why she ends up in the garage most weekends as they trade off wrenches and pliers. Not asking explicitly, even though she wonders why he pushes himself into hugs that leave him (so very obviously) uncomfortable. Why he so selflessly inserts his body between her and the others, when they reach toward her skin absentmindedly. Why his jaw tenses every time.

Raven is okay never knowing because it is something they have in common. A mutual understanding that touch is complicated and that neither of them prefer it, which is why their evenings together are a small scrap of heaven she never thinks she deserves. Six inches apart, the ideal distance. Space filled with words instead of winces.

But silent understandings do not always remain so, and when Raven spends an entire night helping him track down the small-brained thieves who stole the T-car, when he bitterly talks about pouring himself into the nuts and bolts of his baby, she can’t bring herself to keep quiet. This is why, while they sit on the sidewalk and talk, she tells him about her soul-self.

Maybe she thinks he’ll understand. Maybe she thinks the conversation will tilt into different confessions.

“Soul-self?” he asks, unfamiliar with this concept, still holding onto a small scrap of his combusted T-car in one hand.

(Why is she telling him this when he’s mourning?)

At first, it’s an easy connection. Confessing that she knows what it means to lose herself in something else, and he smiles at the words. Smiles at this implicit commonality, even though he can see straight through her and has his thumb on the pulse of where she wants the conversation to go.

“Is that why you don’t like people touching you?” he asks, easy and smooth. He kicks his legs out into the pavement and sighs at the stars, breathing in the quiet.

Raven stiffens. Nods.

“Thought it might be something like that. Since you tense up anyone someone gets too close.”

It’s the first time he’s acknowledged it’s intentional, the way he goes out of his way to avoid brushing up against her, and she feels her throat get full and hard with affection.

“I didn’t think anyone had noticed.”

It’s a lie. Of course she realized when he noticed, because he’s the only one in the Tower who consistently keeps their bodies six inches apart, who makes sure their hands are not touching. And Raven knows that Starfire can’t stop herself, that her hugs are unconscious twitches to ground herself in reality and confirm the bodies beside her are real, and she knows that Beast Boy gets swept up in the whims of the wild, that the animal kingdom is communal and instinctive and hungry. She knows that Robin thinks shoulder pats are the only way to get through to her (because he is not good at conversation, not the way the others are.)

“Oh, baby girl,” he laughs. “You are not that subtle.”

She shrugs, only a little miffed. There are more important things than subtlety when they are finally _talking_ about it, and she wants to understand why he doesn’t avoid touch when it makes his face twist up with pain. “I noticed. That you’re careful not to touch me.”

“Thought maybe you’d appreciate it. Love our family, _god_ I love them, but they’re not so good at keeping their hands to themselves.”

Raven swallows as she tries to find the words. To ask why he recoils so instinctively when he forces himself into hugs and hands and bodies. She doesn’t remember noticing it, the first time.

She can’t stop noticing it now.

“You don’t like it,” she says after a very long pause of car engine sounds and distant honks, when she worries that they will lose this moment before she finds answers.

He drops his head between his knees and stares at the asphalt, Styrofoam milkshake cup clenched tight in his broad fingers. “Not really.”

“I wondered,” she says, pulling her knees into her chest and staring at a streetlamp. If she stares at the streetlamp, it is so much easier to say words she’s never dared to think. “If you were like me.”

“I mean, I’m not an empath or anything… But I get it. Not liking when people touch me. Took me a long time to be okay with it again. Not that I’m completely over it, but…” He sighs. “I don’t punch anyone when it happens now.”

It is rare for either of them to open the history books of their lives before the Titans. Raven likes to keep her childhood locked up in a special box in the back of her head surrounded in cobwebbed lies (the only way she allows herself to love nice things that are temporary, the only way she allows herself to be loved by nice people that are temporary). So Cyborg loosening the bindings of his leatherbound backstory is a fresh breath of relief. She had guessed, because it is not hard to guess, and this is confirmation of his flinches’ confessions.

“Yeah. I mean, after my dad did _this_ ”—he gestures at his body—“I didn’t really trust people with it anymore. You know?”

His _dad_ is a twist she didn’t see coming, but she decides not to acknowledge it. If she makes a big deal of this quiet admission, he might stop sharing. Instead she says, “I wish the others understood.”

“They’d stop, if you asked them.”

“You haven’t asked them to stop, either.”

Cyborg grunts at that, one of his hands going to his knee and absentmindedly running over the joints.

Then, after thirty seconds of sipping her melted strawberry milkshake, Raven feels him look over. She hears him ask it.

“You ever read my mind?”

“No.”

“Because my body is metal, right? Doesn’t happen without skin contact.”

She startles at this. “No.”

He frowns.

“It’s just quiet,” she says, quickly trying to overwrite his doubts before they spiral. “Your aura. It’s one of the reasons I like you.”

With the others, he tends to smile big, loud, full-spirited. With her, it’s a lot more subtle. Just a slow slip of lips to the sky, bending around happy. “Maybe it’s the robot in me.”

“It’s not.”

“Sure.”

Raven almost grabs his hand, as if to prove him wrong, as if to show him that his emotions are just as vibrant as the others’ when their bodies touch, but she stops herself. Remembering, almost too late, that he has boundaries like her, that he’s had those boundaries crossed in unforgivable ways. So she holds her hand out to him instead, offering him a choice.

“What?”

“I thought it might not be so bad, if it’s you.”

There are other, unspoken words in there. Something about how he is not less because his skin is made of circuits and coding. Something about how she trusts him with touch, when she spent most of her childhood desperate for people to stay away, for their thoughts to get out of her head. Something about how she prefers six inches of distance, but she wants to help him rewrite his understanding of consent.

Even though she doesn’t say these things, he takes her hand.

And as metal hits gray, Raven relaxes into the free flow of feeling, which is almost comfortable. With him. A quiet sort of understanding that this is pushing the boundaries of _okay_ , but they’ve both been through it before.

“Does it get easier?” Raven asks eventually, when she thinks that another ten minutes of their minds flush together and their fingers knitted might make her empathy crackle outwards and shatter the streetlamp’s glass. She has noticed his conscious effort to reconnect with people and bodies, even when the panic is so obvious on his face.

“Sometimes.”

It’s not the answer she wanted, but it is honest. And sitting with Cyborg with their thumbs loosely intertwined, both of them holding onto the moments in which they are not touch averse, Raven helps him remember tonight as one of the _sometimes_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be the last regular update for a bit. Real life is about to hit two months of Very Busy TM, and I don't want to get creative burnout. But I hope y'all like this piece!


End file.
